that Britain is consuming with such insatiable thirst.
Sugar had once been the luxury of nobles. Portraits of Tudor aristocrats show their subjects holding precious boxes of sugar as they would white gold. By the mid-eighteenth century, though, the substance was to be found in most middle-class, and many labouring-class, homes.1 Coffee houses and tea gardens were all the rage, places where polite society gathered to sip hot drinks and gossip.
But sugared hot drinks were most often consumed in the comfort of the home. Tea, in particular, was the soft drug of the English, taken behind the closed doors of townhouses and country cottages. A commentator observed in 1744 that the opening of ‘trade with the East Indies brought the price of tea so low, that the meanest labouring man could compass the purchase of it, when sugar, the inseparable companion of tea, came to be in the Possession of the very poorest Housewife, where formerly it had been a great Rarity’.2 White, refined sugar was seen as a status symbol, a way for the middling classes to be associated with the privileged upper classes. Dark-brown sugar was consumed by the lower classes. Breakfast china sets, teacups, saucers and sugar bowls were bought with matching trays. The famous workshop of Josiah Wedgwood supplied an ever-expanding market with pottery and porcelain as tea and coffee became affordable by a wider range of people. Wedgwood grew rich on sugar.
In one humble Hampshire cottage, an unmarried daughter was in charge of sugar and tea supplies (locked in a box, of course, to prevent pilfering). In 1808 her mother had purchased a ‘silver tea-ladle and six whole teaspoons which make our sideboard border on the Magnificent’, and she was given a Wedgwood breakfast set as a present in 1811 – we learn this from the tea-loving daughter, whose name was Miss Jane Austen.3 It was Jane’s job to make breakfast, and every morning she could be found presiding with domestic pride over the large copper teakettle in the dining room. The taking of tea is frequently mentioned in her novels. Miss Bates, the gossip in Emma, is one of the female characters who loves her cup of tea: ‘No coffee, I thank you for me – never take coffee – a little tea if you please.’4
Sugar was also used in cakes, puddings and preserves. British people loved sugary desserts: trifles, fools, syllabubs, apple pies, milk puddings, ice cream. Thanks to drinks and puddings, Britain consumed four times as much sugar in 1770 as in 1710.5
Yet few people, sipping their hot, comforting cup of tea in the mid-eighteenth century, stopped to consider where the white stuff came from, or how it was produced. Nor would many of the sugar addicts have known of the personal cost to the people who produced it: the violence, the exploitation, the horror. Any qualms they might have had were well disguised under the veil of patriotism. Drinking sugared tea supported British colonies, and the moral efficacy of sugared drinks was celebrated: ‘the cup that cheers but does not inebriate’.6 If one did pause to consider the cost, then how would Britain deal with its sugar addiction? Perhaps it was better not to think at all.
I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,
For how could we do without sugar and rum?
Especially sugar, so needful we see?
What? Give up our desserts, our coffee, and tea!
In this poem of 1788, entitled ‘Pity for Poor Africans’, William Cowper, the most popular and admired poet of the day, raises the uncomfortable truths behind the production of what was at the time the most powerful commodity on earth. The consumption of sugar was rendered possible through the exploitation of Africans captured and sold as slaves to work the plantations in the West Indies. Cowper begins with this stanza:
I own I am shock’d at the purchase of slaves,
And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves;
What I hear of their hardships, their tortures, and groans
Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.
Cowper was writing at a time when the abolition movement was under way. Previously, few people stopped to consider that England’s addiction to sugar came at a terrible human cost. When the women of England purchased their hard white phallus of sweetness, they probably wouldn’t have known that it was once sticky, black, viscous molasses, refined to look and taste palatable, stripping it of its nutrients and vitamins.
Sugar growers had discovered that cane was best grown on relatively flat coastal land where the soil was naturally yellow and fertile, and the temperature mild and sunny. The Caribbean provided the ideal climate and conditions. In the last decades of the eighteenth century, four-fifths of the world’s sugar came from the British and French colonies in the West Indies.7 From Barbados, Jamaica, Martinique, Grenada, Saint Croix, the Leeward Islands, St Domingo, Cuba, Guyana and many others. As Europeans established their sugar empire in the Caribbean, prices fell, especially in Britain.
Sugar cane was produced on plantations, which were large-scale, artificially established terrains. After being harvested, the cane was taken to purpose-built distilleries where it was crushed, boiled and refined, then packed into barrels to be shipped to Europe. This was demanding, backbreaking work, carried out in the harshest of conditions.
Over the decades, the sugar plantations became larger and larger. Wherever sugar could be grown, there was a need for a labour force – a labour force that was strong and numerous, that was resistant to diseases such as yellow fever and malaria, that could work well in the heat and humidity. African slaves – men, women and children – became the dominant source of plantation workers.
Jamaica was one of the largest and most brutal slave societies of the region, and the most productive of the sugar islands. In 1805, Jamaican sugar production peaked at over 100,000 tons for the year. The island was the jewel in Britain’s Caribbean crown. This came at a price.
The death rate for black slaves in Jamaica was higher than the birth rate.8 The main causes for this were overwork and malnutrition. Field slaves worked from four in the morning to sundown, in blazing heat. The workforce on each plantation was divided into gangs determined by age and fitness. On average, most estates had three main field gangs. The first comprised the strongest and most able men and women; the second those no longer able to serve in the first; and the third older slaves and older children. Some estates had four gangs, depending on the number of children, who started working as young as three or four years of age.9
The field slaves were required to cut down the canestalks, which were two inches thick and up to fifteen feet high. The field slaves were supervised by demanding masters, who gave them little medical care and beat them indiscriminately. They were flogged if they failed to work quickly enough. They were flogged if they were discovered sucking the calorific, sweet sap released by the cane when it was cut. No allowances were made for pregnant women or those with tiny babies strapped to their back. Life expectancy for a field slave was seven years.10
The cane had to be milled quickly before its sap dried out. It was taken to the crushing mill, where it was hand-fed into huge rollers to squeeze out the dark-brown juice, which then flowed through a trough into the boiling house. It was repeatedly boiled to remove impurities before being poured into cooling tanks. The next stage was to pack the sugar into hogsheads or earthenware cones to dry and crystallise in loaf form. The molasses dripped through a hole at the bottom of the barrel or cone, leaving the sugar
